Preparations For A New Website

Select a Webhost

The three recommended hosting companies for SiteBuilder Elite are Hostgator, Bluehost and Hostmonster due to their low cost, unlimited domain hosting, web space and monthly bandwidth allocation and because setting up SiteBuilder Elite sites on these hosts is very simple. These companies offer good support if problems do arise. Other web hosts can be problematic though that’s the exception rather than the rule. GoDaddy are no longer recommended for a variety of reasons. There's more info on webhosting here.

Do Your Keyword Research

It's important to have your keyword research done so you're spending time building a site that has potential profit in it. You also need to have identified a couple of keywords that can be a part of the domain name you buy. Having a domain name based on a profitable keyword will get your site indexed faster and it helps get your site get ranked in the searche engines better too. So don't skimp on keyword research before you build your site.

Buy A Domain Name

Unless you're going to build a site on a subdomain of an existing domain or in a subfolder, you'll need to buy a domain name for your site. Advice on buying a  domain name is here.

A Note On Domain And SubDomain Website Addresses

Website addresses have two formats:

http://domain.com and http://www.domain.com

The former is primarily used for blogs, the latter for traditional websites like the ones SiteBuilder Elite builds. While entering either web address format into your browser would bring you to the site, they are actually two separate and distinct web addresses. http://domain.com is not the same as http://www.domain.com even though one is mapped onto the other by the domian name servers across the internet.

If you build a site on http://www.domain.com but accidentally build backlinks to http://domain.com, http://www.domain.com won't get much benefit from those backlinks. Pick one web address format and stick to it rigorously.

The Differences Between Subdomains and Subfolders

Search engines see subdomains as separate websites. Search engines see web pages  (or sites) created in subfolders as being part of the primary domain. Using subfolders is one way of partitioning a site into sections where you want different parts of the site to interlink and for the search engines to see everything as all part of one big site.

There can be some confusion between subdomains and subfolders. Subfolders are created by you when you manually create a new folder on your webserver using your FTP  software.

Subdomains, on the other hand, are created through your cPanel or whatever interface your web host provides. When you create a subdomain, it is mapped to a folder on your webserver. You can upload files, change settings etc, in the subdomain, just like you can in a subfolder. But the way subfolders and subdomain operate is fundamentally different.